Rants & Reviews

11 February 2018

The Winter Olympics (2018) Opening Ceremony was a Message to tRump

We want peace! The historic decision by North and South Korea to drop the adjectives and march together as one Korean delegation was the focus of the PyeongChang Opening Ceremony. The neutral team flag was held by two athletes – a South Korean bobsledder and a North Korean ice hockey player. When the visual switched to the VIP box, South Korean president Moon Jae-in was shaking hands with North Korean president Kim Yong-nam and Kim Yo-jong, the sister of Kim Jong-un. A battalion of red-clad North Korean cheerleaders kept up their synched excitement. Then two women from the unified Korean hockey team served as the penultimate torch runners, dramatically ascending a steep mountain of steps together to hand over the torch to the athlete who lit the cauldron.

In that box also sat a moping, dour USA VP Pence and his wife. They alone in that stadium did not stand at the entrance of the host delegation of athletes.

Because of the big time difference, we had already heard about Vice President Pence’s petulant hostility towards these peaceful gestures. Profoundly tin-eared and anti-diplomatic, Pence’s behavior was rude and ridiculous. And scary. On the run-up to the Olympics, Pence had managed to pick a fight with Adam Rippon, the only out gay US athlete, and to belittle the attendance of North Koreans as “propaganda” and “hijacking” the Olympics. Sitting next to President Moon Jae, with the North Koreans and Bach behind him, only Pence sat and pouted. He kept his back stiffly towards to the North Koreans. At an earlier VIP reception, he had refused to shake hands with Kim Yong-nam (which even the Japanese leaders did) and left after a few minutes.

The speakers continued the call for peace. IOC President Thomas Bach made a puzzling decision to throw shade from the podium on Russia, banned from this Olympics due to a state-sponsored doping scandal from the last winter Olympics. But more significantly he emphasized the cooperation between North and South Korea.

South Korean President Moon Jae also spoke of peace and hope. His words were reflected in the rapturous reception the joint Korean delegation received from the stadium crowd. The whole Opening Ceremony seemed like a momentous effort to stop the insane war-mongering by the USA Administration.

Pence’s bullshit “mean boys” attitude was fully out-of-step with the general feeling in the stadium, where you felt that the whole world yearned for peace in the face of such freaky developments in the States since last January. The US war-mongering is not only a threat to the region, but to the entire earth. It stains everything with its coating of creeping fascism, even the technologically dazzling Olympic opening ceremony.